The title of Ross Gay’s poem “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others” recalls the kind of clarity Billy Collins found refreshing in reading Chinese poetry. Unlike the humorous irony Collins uses in his title (“Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles”), Ross instead coldly and un-ironically tells the reader exactly what they can expect in his poem. There is a wincing sort of embarrassment in the title, not from the poet or the speaker, but in the reader, and this poem’s speaker just does not care.
The first four lines brush aside the attempt at embarrassed humor in the “you” of this poem, where they have made, before the poem began, an effort to downplay not only their ignorance, but their accidental racism: “If you think you know enough to say this poem/is about good hair, I’ll correct you/and tell you it’s about history/which is the blacksmith of our tongues” (1-4) The usage of the word “blacksmith” seems to be an ironic response to the attempted humor of the subject, using the play on words of “blacksmith” not only with the literally representation with the word “black,” but also as somebody who has built something, forged something. Alternatively, somebody else has built the tongues and eyes of the black people the speaker is most likely alluding to, and when the speaker addresses the subject’s “misunderstanding” (5), he does not see it as a joke but as what I can only guess is a horrible allusion to the knuckles and teeth of African people, based solely on how Gay contextualizes the “misunderstanding” historically. The “waterlogged/face of the fourteen year-old boy” (7-8) is a reference to Emmett Till, murdered by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. This case, tragic and well-known in its origins, is juxtaposed immediately with the following line: “The bullet’s imperceptible sizzle/toward an unarmed man” (9-10). Is there a name to attach to that man? Yes, many. And no, because there are so many.
After this tense explosion of images that denote the obscene violence levied against African Americans, the speaker returns to the instance at hand and, though the individual in question attempts to minimize their (sickening) faux-pas, “whispering,/but that’s not you?” (12-13), the speaker has zero sympathy: “ I do not/feel sorry for you” (13-14). He alludes to, again, a guess, burning crosses or burning people-“the smell/of smoke” (16-17)-before ending on the heart of the matter, the feeling behind the flashback, which the speaker says is “the distance/between heartbreak and rage” (17-18). Heartbreak here for the unspeakable tragedies of the past and the sadness that the viciousness of the past is still present, though shrouded in the ignorance of the subject; rage, for precisely the same reasons.
Coupled with another of Gay’s poems, “Pulled Over in Short Hills, NJ, 8:00 AM,” we can see the struggle Gay and so many other people that look like him continue to contend with. Frankly, both cases, in both poems, are understandable from the (understood) white subjects, the book signee and the police officer, and both note in cold, rage-filled words how absurdly and unfathomably ignorance, prejudice, arrogance, and misunderstanding pervade our social structures.
Does poetry necessarily have to be politically-charged when presented from the African American perspective? That is to ask, also, that do we automatically assume that there is more politics and social commentary by the nature of the fact that the poet is African American than in, say, Billy Collins or Elizabeth Bishop? What is poetry to the African American poet and reader? Why this medium?
No comments yet.